Two lions brought a British railway in Kenya to a halt.
In 1898 work on the Tsavo bridge stopped and Prime Minister Salisbury spoke of the man-eaters in Parliament. The death toll is still disputed.
More amazing facts
- 1896 There were no gold medals at the first modern Olympics in 1896.
- 1897 · 1898 Heroin was once sold as a cough medicine.
- 1897 In 1897 the state of Indiana nearly passed a law on the value of pi. The House voted unanimously for a bill implying pi = 3.2; it was halted in the Senate because a mathematics professor happened to be in town.
- 1898 Marie Curie's notebooks are still radioactive.
- 1899 The first car to break 100 km/h was electric: in 1899 Belgian driver Camille Jenatzy hit almost 106 km/h near Paris in the torpedo-shaped La Jamais Contente, 'The Never Satisfied'.
- 1899 The head of the US Patent Office never said 'everything that can be invented has been invented'. The line is pinned on Charles Duell in 1899, but there is no evidence for it, and his reports in fact looked forward to new inventions.